control act agreement toraisetaxes. thepresidentdidraisetaxes$600billion, there was never an agreement to raise taxes. so that's where we've got a loggerhead. this is the problem. at the end of debate i remember when the president guaranteed the american people sequester wouldn't happen. but it is happening. it's happening right now in the law. the house has proposed a budget that eliminates cuts on the defense department, besides other cuts to replace them when. the president is saying he wants to eliminate the sequester are apparently indicates he does, but he wants to do it raising taxes and that is a nonstarter. under our current day, we increase spending every year. the difficulty is that pointed out before our committee so many times is half the reductions in spending and sequester file on the defense department come which only make ucmj six of the spending in our government. that is a disproportionate cut. as you talk to congress about the disabilities, i suggest you go to 1600 pennsylvania avenue and talk to the president, commander-in-chief. i am very worried beca

into vbms. the veteran will go online, which exists today, file their claim, liketheirtaxes--apropos to say that today -- it goes directly into vbms, and we completed that whole piece this year in january, without advertising it. we have 500 claims a week going into the system, directly into vbms, and allows us to work them.it never turns into paper. today we have 3% electronic.-- we do not have three percent in paper anymore. we have 14% of our paper that has been converted to electronic since january.i have more than 116,000 electronic claims now, electronic folders, that we did not have at the beginning of this year, so we're moving along in the process. this week i will have another six offices on the new i.t. system. >> thank you. >> mr. secretary, the v.a. backlog reduction plan shows in order to eliminate it by 2015, v.a. will need to decide 1.2 million claims this year, 1.6 million next year, and 1.9 million claims in 2015. v.a. is saying it will decide 335,000 fewer claims in 2013 and 2014.that is in the budget submission. can the v.a. reach 2 million claims in 2015? that wo

't been up front withmytaxes. thiswould prevent d.h.s. from say sharing that information with the internal revenue service? guest: the private companies in sharing information, the biggest concern is -- individuals are concerned that their private information within the cyber networks or systems would be held by private companies but then provided to the government, that this private information would not be stripped by the companies first. in the president's executive order, the onus would be on the privacy advocates. companiesthe private to strip any private information that might be caught up within the context of cyber threat information. first one has to understand the definition of cyber threat. it is unlikely but not impossible that your private tax information, your e-mail content would be part of that information that is a cyber threat information that would be given to the government. is there a possibility that it would be lumped in with that? yes. so whose responsibility is it to minimize and get rid of your private information? the bill does not allow the gov

in cyberspace, and are widely believed already to be responsible for some suchatax. chinaand russia possess formidable capabilities for cyber theft, such as the theft of valuable intellectual property as well as the more traditional areas of espionage, such as spying on our military weapon systems, plans and capabilities. china in particular appears to observe no limit of the theft of american commercial technology. that's cyber theft as a threat that cannot be tolerated. i hope we'll hear from our witnesses about the extent of the problem, and the steps that we can and should take to counter it. the asia-pacific region, another round of belligerence from the dictatorial regime in north korea has caused concern here in the united states, and among our allies in the pacific. that regime has announced its intention to resume a plutonium production, has tested a nuclear device in february that appears to have had a greater yield than previous tests. and has threatened at any time to launch a missile that uld further exacerbatenons. we have read about conflicting intelligence assessments, north

and then eliminate the deficit through two ways. one is increasing the amount of revenue comingthroughtaxpolicy,or reduce the amount of expenditures by cutting back on expenses and spending or some combination of those two. i believe that the most credible way is through what we call a balanced approach. >> john boehner, republican speaker of the house, emphasizes that spending cuts are the most important and effective way to solve the debt problem. >> republicans want to solve this problem by getting the spending line down. the chart depict what i have said for long time. washington has a spending probleatixed withax incaseslone. he wants to keep chasing higher spending with higher taxes. this chart will look a lot worse. our kids and our grandkids are the ones who are going to because washington was too shortsighted to fix the problem. >> the younger generation will suffer from this issue in the future. >> if we don't solve the national debt problem, eventually they're going to cut more government services, and one of the cuts will be education. >> we should invest in education. it has to be